Case Study: Patagonia Backcountry Touring 2024

How we drove visibility of the outdoor brand’s off-piste skiing collection with digital advertising, strengthening their overall technical product presence

Backcountry touring is a type of off-piste skiing that involves trekking out into under-explored terrain far away from the nearest ski lift. It’s much gnarlier than anything you’d do near a resort and the skiers need technical gear that will allow them to have fun on the way down but won’t let them down if they need it.

Backcountry touring attracts the most adventurous winter sports fans and Patagonia have been supporting it as a specific category globally since 2015. Following on from the success of supporting Patagonia Europe’s 2023 backcountry touring season, in mid-2024 we were briefed to support the upcoming season. The objectives were straightforward: create visibility for the new backcountry touring collection and strengthen Patagonia’s overall technical product presence using digital advertising.

A Multi-Platform Digital Advertising Strategy

Building on the previous season’s BCT strategy, we decided to take our tried and tested full-funnel approach, strengthening Patagonia’s technical positioning through awareness objectives and driving purchases of BCT product through conversion objectives. Across three funnel phases, we used a diverse platform mix including YouTube, Google Display, Google DemandGen, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Reddit. 

For awareness, we plugged a 45-second video into the campaigns, targeted at specific segments of Patagonia’s snow audience. We saw different strengths for each platform, with Pinterest generating the most cost-efficient reach and YouTube showing strong video completion rates.

Next, we shifted the focus to driving traffic to the backcountry touring landing page on the website. With all our past experience building digital ad campaigns for Patagonia, we knew that DemandGen would be a traffic-driving workhorse. We gave it a significant budget weighting, which paid off for us. The platform outperformed all other channels, with a high click-through rate and a low cost per click.

For the conversion campaign, we homed in on a select few ad platforms in order to convert engaged people into buyers. We also ran a test of Pinterest collection ads, ingesting a small product catalogue of BCT products into the platform, which served dynamically alongside a stoke video asset. 

As in past seasons, we retargeted people who engaged with the BCT campaign with a suite of Patagonia Action Works assets, which drove traffic to the ‘Your Winter, Your Choice’ landing page on the Action Works site. This page highlights NGOs like Protect Our Winters that are working to combat climate change. In alignment with Patagonia’s brand values, we harnessed the momentum of this Tier A product campaign to convert customers into activists.

Results: Strong ROAS and Millions of Impressions

We achieved our objectives, giving the BCT collection high-value visibility and achieving a strong sell-through. Our tight strategy – along with the strong ad copy and creative – meant the numbers outstripped our expectations, reaching over 158 million impressions.

The collection ads test gained a higher ROAS than other ads on the platform and overall we achieved a ROAS above industry benchmarks. These were strong results considering how technical the category was and even better considering we drove significant traffic to the Action Works site, introducing new customers to Patagonia’s activism.

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